This Lady is a Tramp…Kind Of

For all the funny moments there are in “Easy A,” one of its best comes from an unlikely place. When its heroine Olive (Emma Stone) gets a dirty look at school from her nemesis Marianne (Amanda Bynes), who’s sharpening pencils in brutal silence, Olive cheers her on with mock compliments.

It isn’t what she says that’s funny so much as the way she says it – Marianne goes out of her way to stick it to her with every pencil she smacks on her desk, only for Olive to point out how pretentious she looks. She’s laughing inside, and we can’t help but laugh right along with her.

If you don’t know why that’s funny, well, maybe you needed to be there. Whenever you’re dealing with an actress like Stone, there are moments that depend on the way she behaves, like how she’s aware of her own sex appeal without letting it define her, or how she evens out vulnerability with wit. When Marianne lectures Olive on God and tries to strike through all the sarcasm, she says she’d better pray he has a sense of humor. “Oh, I have 17 years’ worth of anecdotal proof he does,” she replies, and dons a grin that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Disney film.

The teasing between Olive and Marianne is the sideshow, though. The main attraction focuses on Olive’s reputation as the class slut, one that’s not necessarily well-deserved. It started with a lie she told her pal Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka), who she wanted to entertain with wild anecdotes. Though she said what she did in the strictest of confidence, it’s not long before the whole school’s buzzing about her fictional sexcapades. Olive, who likes a little attention, is slow to deny the rumors.

After word gets around to Olive’s friend Brandon (Dan Byrd), he comes up with an indecent proposal: Since he’s sick of classmates picking on him for being gay, he wants her to make everybody believe they went all the way. It’s a big production that winds up working all too well – on top of coming across as the kind of girl who’ll do it with anyone, the handful of guys who figure out what’s going on get her to tell more tall tales that’ll turn them from zeroes to heroes. She even goes one step further by taking a cue from “The Scarlet Letter” and sporting an “A” on her chest, much to the chagrin of her English teacher (Thomas Haden Church).

This is a premise that holds up better than it should, although there are still things about it that are hard to swallow, like the way word on how oversexed Olive is becomes so big while word on what’s really happening spreads just as quickly but stays a secret. (Sure, she needs some guys to hear the truth to keep the lie in motion, but how does she know her secret won’t make its way to the wrong ears?)

It’s the actors who make the whole thing believable, though. Not that anybody can be sure of anything in a movie like this.

This article originally appeared on AllMediaNY.com